I pulled my jumper up and showed you, over my left hip, my tattoo.
This is the story of my tattoo. When we are first lovers, I tell you I want to get a tattoo. You tell me you hate tattoos, you think they’re cheap and that you don’t want me to have one. You say you think their historical precedent, after a century like the twentieth, means tattoos are now forever an indelible sign of a kind of brutality, and you ask me do I know what indelible means and how difficult they are to remove. I tell you I’m going to get one whether you like it or not, and that I want a tattoo of William Blake’s tiger on my shoulder and you say, what, the whole poem? you’ll have to make sure the tattooist knows to spell it with a y. I say no, not the poem, I want the picture he did of the tiger he wrote the poem about. You laugh out loud and tell me what Angela Carter said about that ‘fubsy beast’; she thought he looked more like a pajama case than a tiger. I go away and look up the word fubsy. I’ve never heard it before.
The next night I tell you I’ve decided that I’ll only have a tattoo done if you choose what it’s going to be.
Right, you say, I know exactly what.
You go to your bookshelves (this is before we’re living together, before we do the most faithful act of all, mix our separate books into one library) and you take down a slim volume of Jane Austen, open it and flick through it till you find what you’re looking for.
From there, you say, to there.
I didn’t know there was earlier Jane Austen than Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. This is from something I’ve never heard of called Jack & Alice. I read it:
The perfect form, the beautifull face, & elegant manners of Lucy so won on the affections of Alice that when they parted, which was not till after Supper, she assured her that except her Father, Brother, Uncles, Aunts, Cousins & other relations, Lady Williams, Charles Adams & a few dozen more of particular freinds, she loved her better than almost any other person in the world.
Okay, which bit do you want? I say.
All of it, you say, from The to world, and I’ll expect your tattooist to spell beautiful like Austen does, with two l’s, and friend like the young Austen did, with its i and its e the other way round, f r e i n and d. Or you’ll need to get yourself a new skin because nothing less will do for me if you’re so determined to have a tattoo. Okay?
All of it? I say.
Lucky for you the ands are ampersands, you say.
You are calling my bluff, of course. I call yours back. I take that book to the tattoo parlor down Mill Road and I come home, after several sessions, with exactly this tattoo. I choose to have it done in deep blue, the color of your eyes. It costs me a fortune. It hurts like irony.
I see you again only when it’s finished and my skin’s settled down.
You’re unreal, you say when you see it. You’re the real unreal thing all right.
Less than a month after this we move in together and mix our books up.
Now I stood in front of the phantom you with my shirt pulled up so you with your deep black eyes were level with my hip bone.
Since you went, I say, I’ve almost slept with just one other person. I don’t know why I did, I was lonely, I suppose, and I was going a bit mad. Anyway, this person, she opened my shirt, you know, we were about to, and she looked at my tattoo and she said: did you know they’ve spelt the word beautiful wrong on your tattoo. And she didn’t even bother to read down as far as the word freind, to comment on that. So I buttoned up my shirt again and I made up an excuse and I left.
You looked at my hip bone then you looked up at me and for the first time since you’d come back I thought I saw something like recognition cross your face.
That’s what two is again, you said.
*
The twelvemonth and a day being up,
The dead began to speak:
‘Oh who sits weeping on my grave,
And will not let me sleep?’
“Tis I, my love, sits on your grave,
And will not let you sleep;
For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,
And that is all I seek.’
1: You Must Remember This: why we have time and why time has us
What’s the quickest short story in the world? Once upon a time gentlemen please. What would a place without time be like? Maybe a bit like George Mackay Brown describes Tir-Nan-Og, the land of eternal youth ‘far in the west,’ where
there was no sickness or withering or suffering or death. Always the fields were heavy and gold with harvest, always the orchards were laden with apples; all the stones were precious. No storms beat about the ships and the doors of the people. The people of Tir-Nan-Og were themselves young and beautiful for ever, with no ashes in the beard or in the long lissom golden hair of a girl.
It’d never work. It’d be like being dead and not knowing it. We’d pick up one stone after another and they’d all be the boring precious same. We’d have to invent leaflessness, imagine harvest failure. Then we’d invent time. And as soon as we did, everything would become meaningful and the first gray hairs would appear and until they did we’d probably feign death just so we could tell stories about it.
Walter Benjamin says that’s where the storyteller’s authority comes from, death. Joseph Conrad, in his 1917 novel, The Shadow-Line, sees a lack of time as a state of absolute childishness, where only ‘the very young have, properly speaking, no moments.’ Time means. Time will tell. It’s consequence, suspense, morality, mortality. Boxers fight in bouts between bells ringing time. Prisoners do time. Time’s just ‘one damn thing after another,’ Margaret Atwood says. That sounds like conventional narrative plot. And at the end of our allotted time, we’ll end up in one of those, a conventional plot I mean, unless we stipulate otherwise in our wills. From one will to another, to Shakespeare, and his thoughts on Devouring Time, Time’s pencil, Time’s fell and injurious hand, Time’s scythe, Time’s fickle glass: ‘Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate / That Time will come and take my love away.’ The first line, in its conscious rhetoric and with its internal rhyme, its alliterating, its assonance, its thusing, is literally undone by the next line, the thud of monosyllable after monosyllable eight times before the word away. Time will undo us. Sometimes we don’t want it to, sometimes we do. ‘O time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me t’untie,’ Viola says, transformed into her own dead brother in Twelfth Night, before the whirligig of time brings in his revenges and the plot, having thickened, finally thins.
Is it time that translates our lives into sequence, into meaning? Does sequence mean that things mean? Sequence will always be most of the word consequence. José Saramago in his memoir, Small Memories (translated by Margaret Jull Costa), recalls being ten years old when his grandmother died; he specifically remembers this time of his child self’s coming to consciousness by a linkage of clocks and death:
My mother turned up one morning at the school in Lago do Leão to bring the unfortunate news. She had come to fetch me, perhaps following some social convention of which I knew nothing, but which, apparently, on the death of a grandparent, required the grandchildren to be brought home at once. I remember glancing up at the clock on the wall in the entrance hall above the door, and thinking, like someone making a conscious effort to collect information that might prove useful to him in future, that I should make a note of the time. I seem to recall that it was a few minutes past ten.